Caltech Mathematics Professor Wins 2019 Sloan Fellowship

Philip Isett, assistant professor of mathematics at Caltech, has been named a winner of a Sloan Research Fellowship. The fellowships, awarded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, "seek to stimulate fundamental research by early career scientists and scholars of outstanding promise," according to the organization's website. Each year, the Sloan Foundation grants the fellowships to 126 researchers; this year, the awards will come with $70,000 to be spent as the winners see fit.

Isett works in partial differential equations, focusing on solutions to the incompressible Euler equations of fluid dynamics, which date back to their namesake, Leonhard Euler, an 18th-century Swiss scientist. Fluids are inherently highly complex systems and are hard to precisely analyze with mathematics. Recently, Isett successfully solved a problem related to the Euler equations known as Onsager's conjecture, named after its proposer, Lars Onsager, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1968.

Isett received Bachelor of Science and Bachelor of Arts degrees from the University of Maryland, College Park in 2008 and a PhD from Princeton University in 2013. He then worked at MIT as a C.L.E. Moore Instructor and as a National Science Foundation postdoctoral scholar. He was named assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin before coming to Caltech in 2018.